Digitale Epidemiologie

Abstract

Digital epidemiology is a new and rapidly growing field. The technological revolution we have been witnessing during the last decade, the global rise of the Internet, the emergence of social media and social networks that connect individuals worldwide for information exchange and social interactions, and the almost complete social penetration of mobile devices such as smartphones provide access to data on individual behavior with unprecedented resolution and precision. In digital epidemiology, this type of high-resolution behavioral data is analyzed to advance our understanding of, for example, infectious disease dynamics and improve our abilities to forecast epidemic outbreaks and related phenomena.